Love Lyrics

'Now an ambitious new publishing project, "The Clay Sanskrit Library" brings together leading Sanskrit translators and scholars of Indology from around the world to celebrate in translating the beauty and range of classical Sanskrit literature...Published as smart green hardbacks that are small enough to fit into a jeans pocket, the volumes are meant to satisfy both the scholar and the lay reader. Each volume has a transliteration of the original Sanskrit text on the left-hand page and an English translation on the right, as also a helpful introduction and notes. Alongside definitive translations of the great Indian epics - 30 or so volumes will be devoted to the Mahabharat itself - "Clay Sanskrit Library" makes available to the English-speaking reader many other delights: The earthy verse of Bhartrihari, the pungent satire of Jayanta Bhatta and the roving narratives of Dandin, among others. All these writers belong properly not just to Indian literature, but to world literature' - "LiveMint". '"The Clay Sanskrit Library" has recently set out to change the scene by making available well-translated dual-language (English and Sanskrit) editions of popular Sanskritic texts for the public' - "Namarupa". The short lyric poem appears with great frequency in Sanskrit collections and displays a wide range of themes. Bhartrihari is the most famous composer. Amaru and Bilhana also offer excellent examples. This anthology of the Love Lyrics of three Indian poets conjures up an atmosphere of love both sensual and social, ever in tension with love's rejection or repression. The flavor of all these poems - Amaru's seventh-century C.E. "Hundred Poems", Bhartrihari's anthology "Love, Politics, Disenchantment", from the fourth century, and Bilhana's eleventh-century "Fifty Stanzas of a Thief" - is the universalized aesthetic experience of love. It is co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation.